The Upper Floor.

All along the modelling process I decided I was going to leave out the Upper Floor, until the final stages of the model, I felt that without the upper floor the model did not look right. Although it was debated whether or not an upper floor was built the arguments that prove there was one outweigh its nonexistence. Ultimately this decision would then lead to my downfall. When modelling the upper floor for the first time I extruded the polygons on the top of the walls of the ground floor and also beveled the pillars to make them look like buttresses to become the beginnings of a support for a roof.

Like so.

I then began creating the windows in the upper floors by using the boolean command to remove boxes I had created.

Like so

With these removed I was finally going to move onto adding the textures and materials to my structure. That’s when 3DS max decided to crash. Throughout the whole project I had never had any issues with the system crashing and thought at that point my experience with that was just far too good to be true. Unfortunately I had not got any of my work saved up to this point and it wasn’t salvageable.

So I began the process again, however this time I don’t know what I did when extruding the sides of the walls I somehow messed up the geometry and when it came to using the boolean command to subtract a box the walls it would only work for one side. At this point I became frustrated and tried pretty much anything to remove some of the objects to create the windows on each side. I began connecting edges together, removing the polygons etc…. nothing I did however seemed to work and I was gone past the point of no return. For this reason the upper story only has one window and one slightly distorted wall where I was adjusting the edges to try and create another window. My biggest regret with the project was that I extended the walls instead of building another structure separately and so may not of had as many issues regarding the the geometry when trying to use modifiers or the boolean command.

As I had taken up so much time recreating this upper floor I lost time in trying to complete the materials of the structure. Only the arches over the doorways and the fountain truly have the proper materials I wanted.

It was a disappointing end for me personally to the project as I felt I had the potential to model so much more, the materials, a proper Upper Floor with windows, the capitals and the decorative stones. I have learned my lesson though, it is ultimately easier to build objects and join them together than what I started off doing by trying to model the objects I already had, this could be said for the arches I first started off with and the Upper Floor example from above. I also learned that just because for the first 95% of the project I had no issues with 3DS max it doesn’t mean that this can turn around and change drastically at the end. But most importantly I have learned to always always save your work and not give the software the opportunity to delete your hard work.